Horizontal lines during action scenes. Why?

[fmctm1sw]

I don't know whether I am doing something wrong in the conversion stage or capture. Here's what I did:

1] I capped Monday Night Raw at 480x360 using huffyuv compression. That is the highest (compressed) resolution my slow computer setup will allow. I can do 640x480 but I can't use compression. I am capping from my Directv box using the C-video input to a hauppauge wintv card (using btwincap drivers windows 2K).

2] I converted with TMPG (the first hours worth) to VCD using all the default settings for everything (whatever the wizard told me).

3] The playback was fair until any kind of high speed action scene was played (you know, pretty much all of it). A bunch of horizontal lines popped up on the screen.

4] I encoded to SVCD and it did pretty much the same thing.

It takes me FOREVER to convert, so if anyone can tell me something else to try, please do.

[Barnabas]

That's interlacing. You won't see the lines on your TV from your DVD player.

[fmctm1sw]

Sorry Barn, I forgot to mention. That WAS on my standalone DVD player. My computer won't play any SVCD's (because I don't have a codec?).

[Barnabas]

I have read that some Apex 1100w's have problems with SVCD's so that *might* be your problem. You DO need a mpeg2 codec to play back MPEG2 encoded files on your computer. Software DVD players will have this, and there is one you can download in the "tools" section of this forum.

Two other things it might be.

1: Wrong field order. Should usually be A for a WinTV board.
2: Power noise from power supplies.

If you used the wizard, that will usually find the correct field order, unless you tell the Huffy codec to swap fields on decompress.

I have to disconnect all my power supplies to my USB devices when I capture on my Hauppauge WinTV non hardware compression card, otherwise I get horizontal lines when there are loud sounds going on.

You would be better off to use the S-Video from your DirecTV box rather than the composite input.

[fmctm1sw]

Two other things it might be.

1: Wrong field order. Should usually be A for a WinTV board.
2: Power noise from power supplies.

If you used the wizard, that will usually find the correct field order, unless you tell the Huffy codec to swap fields on decompress.

I have to disconnect all my power supplies to my USB devices when I capture on my Hauppauge WinTV non hardware compression card, otherwise I get horizontal lines when there are loud sounds going on.

You would be better off to use the S-Video from your DirecTV box rather than the composite input.

I meant S-video, I just can't type. Do you think messing around with the bitrates in TMPG would do anything?

[Barnabas]

No, horizontal lines are not due to the bitrate. A low bitrate would just give your macroblocks.

If you have some web space, upload a 5-10 meg clip that shows the horizontal lines so I can look at them. I can tell much better by looking at it.

Does your AVI have the lines in exactly the same place, or is it only on the MPEG2 file?

Did you de-interlace in TMPGenc, what settings did you use?

[fmctm1sw]

No, horizontal lines are not due to the bitrate. A low bitrate would just give your macroblocks.

If you have some web space, upload a 5-10 meg clip that shows the horizontal lines so I can look at them. I can tell much better by looking at it.

Does your AVI have the lines in exactly the same place, or is it only on the MPEG2 file?

Did you de-interlace in TMPGenc, what settings did you use?

I think I do get macroblocks a little too, but mainly lines. I don't remember de-interlacing with TMPG, I just used all the default setting for VCD and SVCD.

[Barnabas]

Macroblocks are part of lower bitrate encoding. You can keep them to a minimum, but scenes like river rapids are TOUGH to compress at low bitrates. Upload 5-10 megs of your capture, I can then see exactly what you are are dealing with.

[unicorn23]

Hi,
Just thought I would mention that when I too tried to cap with full resolution I also got these interlacing artifacts. So I did something that was suggested on tv-cards.something(not sure about the url), I started capping at half the res of the i/p signal(i.e. 320x240 for NTSC and 352x288 for PAL). Apparently when you do this the capture card takes only one field into consideration and eliminates the other, also eliminating the need for any de-interlacing post-processing while converting the video to another format. Now if you are converting the video to VCD you do not even need to change the resolution as these res above are those of std VCD. For SVCD on the other hand you could do a bicubic resize to the final res in TMPGenc.

Hope this helps. Always encode in TMPGenc and burn with VCDEasy. Always works for me. Also stop other apps while capping including Virus s/w to decrease the load on the processor.